You know it's a world gone off the rails when people mourn and honor one man while no one pays attention to the anniversary of the passing of another. No death is to be lauded (well, maybe that's not always true), but the amount of attention a death receives is a telling tale of how our society is functioning, how healthy it is, what its values are.
One was an actor; one whose talent, such as it was, was to entertain people, distract them from the real world of troubles, to provide the modern opiate of the masses; I hear little that suggests some form of selfless duty. In a world that celebrates excess and talentless celebrity, he is mourned by those who did not know him for what they have lost, not for who he might have been - we conveniently ignore who those celebrities really are.
The other was an unknown to most people, much as are all of his comrades; he did not entertain us, he merely served his nation when he was asked in relative anonymity. Even now, I am sure most who mourn Hoffman have no idea who Chris Kyle was.
Both are useful to today's self-centered, media-driven world. Hoffman is seen as a sad character, one who had such talent (again, if that is your thing) but wasted it. In our celebrity-obsessed culture, he was seen as a person who might have had everything the sycophants could ever want and yet it was not enough. A cautionary tale for sure of how no amount of fame can immunize one against their own bad choices. Kyle, for all of his commitment to his country and his fellow warriors, is seen by today's liberal culture as a cautionary tale of gun-nuttery. A decorated sniper, one who had chosen to use the weapons that liberals find so objectionable to defend their freedom to object and sadly, died unnecessarily from such a weapon in the hands of a fellow warrior he was trying to help. Perhaps one can make a case that both deaths were, in some way, self-inflicted, but one was a self-centered decent into despair, while one was a selfless, if ill-conceived, act of caring.
But what is more ridiculous is how quickly and rabidly the law has jumped on Hoffman's death to try to find someone other than Hoffman responsible. It is only a brave journalist who would note that no one forced drugs on Hoffman or forces them on any one else (a commentary that the Huffington Post called "ugly"). Oh, the inhumanity of suggesting that people are responsible for their own behavior and the ends they reap. Surely there must be a bad childhood, oppression, repression, discrdiscriminationrivation, or a disease at work?
No, no death is laudable, all untimely death is tragic, whether chosen or encountered. But the death of a man who had dedicated his life to his country and to trying, in his own way, to help those who had served, deserves at least the same attention as the death of an entertainer, an actor, who made bad choices. Both made some questionable choices, played a part in their own demise.
The response to Hoffman's death exposes a critical fallacy, a critical bias, in today's liberal thinking; it is at once hedonistic and self-absorbed with its own desires, own insistence on doing what it wants today while consistently absolving itself of all responsibility for the ends of those choices.
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